Can it really be 30 years since I began my career fresh out of college as a COBOL programmer? After a short stint as an applications programmer I moved into the Systems Programming field in the early days of MVS (for you newbies that was several generations before z/OS). I saw the revolution that was MVS/XA and then MVS/ESA and the large scale changes to the computing environment brought about by the improvements in each of these new releases of the operating system.

This blog isn't as much about the improvements in technology. While that is very interesting and probably warrants coverage in a future blog, this entry is largely about my musings about the last 30 years. No, I'm not going to give year by year coverage. I'd bore myself to tears writing it and I'm sure readers would not expend the effort to read it. However, it is interesting to me to consider the skills that were required of me and my peers and to wonder are those skills that are still being taught.

Will there be a next generation of Sysprogs? Will skills like REXX, SMP/E and my all time favorite Assembler programming diminish in the work place and just go away. If they don't go away, will the younger folks find these skills as fun and challenging or are they more enamored with web GUI'S and other such pretty innovations? Will sub second response for things like TSO and CICS be in demand or pretty pictures and 5-10 second response from a web console?

Better yet, will there be a demand for old guys like me? Maybe I can retire and then double dip and do some free lance Assembler programming!! I'd be interested to hear from other Sysprogs, both younger and older. How do you see the field shaping up in the future?